My Biggest Struggles in 2023

Hey friends,

Every 2 weeks, I have a session with my CEO coach, Eric Partaker.

This is always ridiculously helpful – I’ve gained so much clarity on the direction of my business, I’ve got a better understanding of how to lead a team, and I generally feel like I’ve levelled up a lot since I started working with him.

This week’s session was about reflections and lessons learned from the last 3 months, so I thought I’d share my reflections with you too:

Biggest Wins

🎬 The Part-Time YouTuber Academy – We’ve been absolutely smashing it in terms of sales numbers. We sold out in record time and banked almost 2 million dollars in revenue, which is insane. Plus, given that our revenue goal for the entire year is 4 million dollars it takes a lot off the stress off making money from whatever else we do in the business for the rest of 2023. I’m super excited to kick things off in April.

🏃 Health & Fitness progress – I’ve been consistently working out pretty much every day over the last few months. I’ve noticed myself making good progress in terms of body aesthetics, I’ve recently got into kickboxing, and just generally taken the health aspect of my life more seriously. Given that this is an area of my life I’m most liable to ignore in favour of work, it’s been super helpful to build systems for accountability (with my coach, Dan Go) and to actually enjoy the process. So, hopefully it won’t be too long before I become a Gymshark athlete 😉

📚 Writing the book – At the start of the year I wasn’t overly optimistic about how the book was going, but since then I’ve been iterating on the drafts with the editor pretty much non-stop. It’s now shaping up into something that looks quite reasonable, I think. So, I’m very excited to see what the end product looks like and also to potentially begin working on future book projects too.

Biggest Challenges

⏳ Making time for my book – In January, our editors made a bunch of suggested edits and improvements to the book, which made everything a lot less clear for me in terms of what needed to be done and how long it would take to get things across the finish line. Plus, I was putting off making these edits in favour of other things that were happening in the business, like the launch of the Part-Time YouTuber Academy. It always felt like there was something more important to do. So, at the beginning of the quarter I didn’t really make much progress with the book.

🎥 Filming stuff daily – I set myself a challenge of filming something every day of the quarter. The idea was that every morning I needed to film at least one thing because after lunch I always had a bunch of other work that needed sorting. This was tough. But, it also forced me to have more confidence in my abilities and to have more faith in being able to share stuff without perfectionism getting in the way. Even after 5+ years of making YouTube videos I still struggle with the idea that what I have to say isn’t valuable or isn’t quite right, so this was an exercise in learning to trust myself more and just being comfortable with sharing my thoughts without feeling the need to perfectly package each piece of content I share.

💪 Making time for my health – As I mentioned, I’ve been pretty consistent with health stuff this quarter, but it hasn’t always been easy. At the start of the quarter, I literally had to book in a session with my personal trainer before I prioritised going to the gym. But, now I block out time in my calendar at the start of every week dedicated to doing something for my health. And some days I’ll only exercise for 30 minutes instead of an hour like I planned, but progress is more important than perfection. As long as I do something every day to improve my health then it’s a good day 🙂

Takeaways

🤏 Beat procrastination by lowering the bar – When I got the first edit back from the publisher in January I procrastinated a hell of a lot because it just felt like a lot of work. Like, I thought I’d have to put in hours and hours of work to make all the changes. But, instead, if I’d just recognised that doing something is better than nothing – even if it’s just 30 minutes a day – I’d have made so much more progress.

So, the takeaway here is that whenever you find yourself procrastinating you should lower the bar until the thing becomes so easy to do you stop procastinating. And then, as you start to do the thing, you can slowly begin to raise the bar, which motivates you to achieve bigger goals.

🧠 Beat perfectionism by using the 80/20 principle – A mindset shift that’s really helped me deal with my perfectionism around content creation is by 80/20ing whatever I’m doing. Basically instead of trying to make every video 100% perfect, I focus on the 20% of effort that’s going to produce a video that’s 80% as good.

So, let’s say it normally takes me 5 hours to script and record a video, by applying the 80/20 rule I can spend just 1 hour of my time to create a video to a very similar standard. Plus, in the same time it would previously have taken me to create 1 video, I can now create 5 really solid videos instead (which genuinely look and perform just as good).

What are your biggest wins/challenges from the quarter?

Have a great week!

Ali xx

P.S. Eric’s also growing blazing fast on LinkedIn – a testament to just how valuable his business coaching and mentoring is. He’s already had a huge impact on my business and team, so be sure to follow him on LinkedIn for stellar advice.

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Thanks to Write of Passage for sponsoring this issue of Sunday Snippets 🙏

♥️ My Favourite Things

🎬 Video – How to achieve your most ambitious goals. This is a great TEDx talk by Stephen Duneier, who explains an approach to decision making that’s transformed him from someone who struggled with simple tasks to a guy who’s continuously achieving his most ambitious dreams.

🤖 Tool – Chat GPT-4. I want everyone on my team to be world experts at using artificial intelligence to improve the work that they do. Given that Chat GPT-4 launched this week, I’ve asked everyone to learn how to use it properly and find the best possible prompts to improve the accuracy of the results it produces. In short, Chat GPT-4 is OpenAI’s super intelligent AI chat bot and has been great for giving me ideas for videos, helping me with book research, and improving my overall workflow – I highly recommend everyone checks it out.

🎙️ Podcast – Deep Question with Cal Newport. I’ve binged about 7 episodes of Cal Newport’s podcast this week and I’m slowly working my way through the back catalogue. I really like how he dives into specific questions and the level he pitches the content at. Plus, it’s giving me a bunch of ideas for stuff I want to write about and the format I want to use for the Not Overthinking podcast that I co-host with my brother. So, if anyone’s interested in living a deep life where you’re more productive and fulfilled then make sure you check it out.

🎬 My New Videos

😣 Why you struggle to stay motivated – I’ve always been fascinated by motivation and what drives us as humans, and recently I’ve dived deep into the topic for my book about productivity, but also through reading Freely Determined by Kennon M. Sheldon. So in this video I go over this book and the 4 main types of motivation, and share 5 practical tips on how to stay motivated for whatever it is you want to do.

😴 My Evidence-Based Sleep Routine – Over the past few months, I’ve interviewed experts, listened to podcasts and consumed loads of papers and books to better understand the science behind effective sleep. I’ve collated all the information into this video which breaks down the 9 evidence based things that I’ve built into my routine to help improve my sleep and ensure that I feel well-rested throughout the day.

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✍️ Quote of the Week

From The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R Covey. Resurfaced using Readwise.